For example, my README repo is and must be called “glacials/glacials”; if I wanted to delete it that is what I would type, but if I were an organization and wanted to delete it, I would type something else. This different behavior between acting as a user vs. acting as an organization is what caught the author off-guard. They typed “httpie/httpie” and consciously thought “yes, I want to delete the README repo, which I know must have name httpie/httpie, so that’s definitely what I’d like to do, I’ll go ahead and type that”.
This is not absentmindedness, it is a misleading product inconsistency. Were it not for this, I would 100% agree with you.
It’s fine to express the gulf of evaluation and execution that led to the error. It happened. There may not be any better known solutions at the moment to lower the risk any further.
Calling them careless is also unjustified. They made a mental error processing the information. Whenever humans are involved there is a risk of illogical and bizarre mental errors in decision making because we are degenerating meat robots granted full agency.
Shit happens. How we emotionally deal with it is the test of life as a human being.
>The dialog should be more contextual and, paraphrasing again, it should say “You’re about to kill 55,000 people.” That would’ve certainly made me pause.
> Honestly, they are blaming Github here.
I think both of these statements can be true at the same time. They are taking much of the responsibility while also explaining how some aspects of Github's design are partly responsible for the outcome.
It's not like they can just run a few SQL queries on prod and have the author PayPal them 10$.
They need to create a plan, cost estimate, risk assessment, get management/qa/security/SRE/... approvals, write the code, documentation, reviews, tests, run on prod, create invoice, etc. This means 10-20 people work for 1-2 days. I doubt that the author is willing to pay 20000-60000$ for this.
> That humble tool, which we open-sourced, quickly captured developers’ hearts and rapidly became one of the top projects on GitHub.
> We’ve raised a Seed Round ...
It's not hard to believe the seed round and the entire pitch of the commercial venture was tied to the star count, and it's not hard to believe that the author would drop $1/star to restore the count.
There's no harm in that, and Github being used by millions of developers is a strong reason to make it just a little bit safer for even the rarer cases like these.
The article describes exactly what else they could do, including example screenshots from another app that does it.
This screen gives you pretty poor context for your action. You can’t so easily see things that normally tell you at a glance where you are. They also don’t offer a good preview of the action, or undo, which is how you normally make potentially destructive actions less dangerous. Instead they made a scary prompt, but since they use that solution a lot, users may get desensitized to it.